Talk:Editing utility

Um... what the hell?!? Now THAT would be a historically important item to have an article on (keep reading to the fourth message in the thread), assuming it actually existed. Ryan W 03:06, February 22, 2010 (UTC)  Never mind; he did release it, it just had a different name. Maybe everybody knew that but me. Ryan W 03:14, February 22, 2010 (UTC)

Overhaul?
I think this page could use being largely rewritten. The way it's currently is not very useful: it's split into categories (like level editor, node builder, etc.) without explaining what those are, and then subcategories by operating systems, which is not very relevant anymore. It's also not adapted to cross-platform utilities, since either their mentions are duplicated and triplicated (e.g. SLADE) or they're misleadingly only listed on one platform despite being also available on others (e.g. Eureka). Also, the macfury link doesn't seem to worth keeping, while the site still exists all I can see on it is a broken frame including a blown-up PLAYA1 sprite. I'd welcome suggestions for how to make this more useful for newcomers while keeping the encyclopedic exhaustiveness. --Gez (talk) 05:52, 22 December 2019 (CST)


 * All very fair. I won't defend the 2006 overhaul, except insofar as it replaced a proposal to delete the article and have readers trawl through sub-sub-categories to gather every title.  :P


 * Bad download links are a much broader issue than this page, so I hope you won't wait on that before making other improvements. IMO contributors who find  should just submit them to /idgames and link there instead.


 * To answer your question, we now have this as a vaguely successful example (which I realize you opposed initially). So I can visualize a structure like
 * Lead paragraph
 * Historical narrative, highlighting initial development of seminal pieces (DEU, DeHackEd, DB1)
 * For each type of tool, ordered from common to esoteric:
 * Main article: Yada yada
 * Précis of what this allows the author to achieve, and any prominent gameplay consequences like vanilla special effect tropes. In the WAD editor section, mention lumps expected to be imported from general-purpose programs, like scripts (text editor) or songs (music authoring app)
 * Link to subcategory
 * Comparison table of maintained Windows map editors by feature inclusion, then by format / game support
 * Advice for present-day Mac users
 * Advice for Linux users (still comes up on forums now and then)


 * The last two are without prejudice to, say, self-contained articles about setting up hardcore vintage environments (I'm sure people tried modding on Amiga 3000s, with all those multimedia suites, and Mac OS 7 remains underrepresented).


 * Regarding thoroughness, we could reserve one-off releases and redlinks to a separate list per precedent, assuming I half-assed the research and many names are still omitted. If the current list is nearly complete despite my involvement, maybe a simple RFC to generate the remaining stubs?


 * FWIW / KUTGW. Ryan W (living fossil) 17:28, 27 December 2019 (CST)